In his new book, Paris Marx explores how global anti-data center movements are fighting Big Tech’s power over us.

From Ashburn, Virginia, to South Dublin, Ireland, the data centers that journalist Paris Marx visited all looked remarkably similar: large industrial facilities with loud air-conditioning units running to keep racks upon racks of servers cool. But it was the security measures around the data centers that struck Marx more than anything. 

Tall fences. Security cameras everywhere. Locks on every door that required one of the few full-time employees to unlock with a badge. And in one memorable instance, standing on an Irish public curb outside a cluster of Microsoft-owned centers, there was an eerie feeling of being watched by men on lawn mowers, trimming grass that clearly didn’t need to be cut.

“It was just really staggering to me that it was at that level that it was so hard to move through these spaces,” Marx told me.

The intense security should give you an idea of just how serious Big Tech is about its data centers. These facilities are the key to the artificial intelligence programs at OpenAI, Meta, Google, Amazon and elsewhere, creating vast amounts of compute and sucking up equally staggering amounts of electricity and water. 

There is no stronger metaphor for the manifestation of Big Tech’s power than the increasing sprawl of data centers. Amazon, Microsoft and Google alone control 59% of hyperscale data center capacity. In his new book available now, Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires , Marx, host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast , highlights how global data center protests are one of many ways that communities are pushing back against Big Tech’s power over us.

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